in the garden :: August 28

Ah, these days in the garden....are mostly being spent in the kitchen! Freezing and fermenting more beans (more beans! Oh wow), roasting tomatoes, drying herbs, and making pickles.

In the garden, I'm still working on harvesting the potatoes - I have just one more variety to go. So far we're at three bushels going into storage, though it looks like it might ultimately be five which I'm so thrilled about. It's turned out to be our best potato year yet. Lots of you have asked about potato storage - we store them in paper bags, on shelves, in our dirt floor basement that keeps a humidity of 90 degrees. We are working on improving ventilation right now which will help the air circulation down there, a problem we had last year. This Mother Earth News article is a great starting point for root cellar planning.

Tomatoes are coming in slowly, and at a decent yield....but it's never quite enough. I think the only way I'll be able to grow enough of the tomatoes that we really need to preserve, I'll have to make the switch to growing them in a greenhouse. For this year, I'm putting as much as I can in the freezer.

Cold frame building and cover crop planting are at the very top of my to do list this week, and I'm hoping that this coming weekend both of those are done. But that'll mean keeping up with everything that's coming out of the garden, which is a whole lot right now! I think I'll have to put some of these helpers of mine to work in the garden.

Our next garden update will be in September! That's so hard to believe, but true. Enjoy these last August days in your gardens, friends!

. . .

If you're keeping garden notes and photographs and want to share it with the rest of us, do leave a comment with a link so that we may take a stroll through your garden too! It's a delight to see what and how things are growing all over, and to read the comments with such great gardening wisdom! Thank you all for continuing to share in this little project.

Comments

Ah, these days in the garden....are mostly being spent in the kitchen! Freezing and fermenting more beans (more beans! Oh wow), roasting tomatoes, drying herbs, and making pickles.

In the garden, I'm still working on harvesting the potatoes - I have just one more variety to go. So far we're at three bushels going into storage, though it looks like it might ultimately be five which I'm so thrilled about. It's turned out to be our best potato year yet. Lots of you have asked about potato storage - we store them in paper bags, on shelves, in our dirt floor basement that keeps a humidity of 90 degrees. We are working on improving ventilation right now which will help the air circulation down there, a problem we had last year. This Mother Earth News article is a great starting point for root cellar planning.

Tomatoes are coming in slowly, and at a decent yield....but it's never quite enough. I think the only way I'll be able to grow enough of the tomatoes that we really need to preserve, I'll have to make the switch to growing them in a greenhouse. For this year, I'm putting as much as I can in the freezer.

Cold frame building and cover crop planting are at the very top of my to do list this week, and I'm hoping that this coming weekend both of those are done. But that'll mean keeping up with everything that's coming out of the garden, which is a whole lot right now! I think I'll have to put some of these helpers of mine to work in the garden.

Our next garden update will be in September! That's so hard to believe, but true. Enjoy these last August days in your gardens, friends!

. . .

If you're keeping garden notes and photographs and want to share it with the rest of us, do leave a comment with a link so that we may take a stroll through your garden too! It's a delight to see what and how things are growing all over, and to read the comments with such great gardening wisdom! Thank you all for continuing to share in this little project.

. . . . . . . .

Greetings! I'm Amanda Blake Soule - mother of five, author of three books on family creativity, and editor-in-chief of Taproot Magazine. I live with my family in an old farmhouse in Western Maine where we raise animals, grow vegetables and make lots of things. I write about it all here on the blog. Thank you for visiting!